The development of computerized distributed information resources, such as the "Internet," allows users to link to a computer network and retrieve vast amounts of electronic information previously unavailable in an electronic medium. Such electronic information increasingly is displacing more conventional means of information transmission, such as newspapers, magazines, and even television.
Electronic information transferred between computer networks (e.g., the Internet) can be presented to a user in hypertext, a metaphor for presenting information in a manner in which text, images, sounds, and actions are linked together in a complex, non-sequential web of associations that permits the user to "browse" through related topics, regardless of the presented order of the topics. For example, traveling among links to the word "iron" in an article displayed within a graphical user interface in a computer system might lead the user to the periodic table of the chemical elements, or to a reference to the use of iron in weapons in Europe in the Dark Ages. The term "hypertext" is used to describe documents, as presented by a computer, that express the nonlinear structure of ideas, as opposed to the linear format of books, film, and speech. The combination of hypertext documents connected by their links in the Internet is referred to as the World Wide Web (WWW).
Networked systems utilizing hypertext conventions typically follow a client/server architecture. A client is usually a computer that requests a service provided by another computer (i.e., a server). A server is typically a remote computer system accessible over a communications medium such as the Internet. Based upon such requests by the user at the client, the server presents information to the user as responses to the client. The client typically contains a program, called a browser, that communicates the requests to the server and formats the responses for viewing (browsing) at the client.
Servers typically contain "web pages" (also referred to simply as "pages"), which are data files, or documents, written in a hyper-text language that may have text, graphic images, and even multimedia objects, such as sound recordings or moving video clips, associated with that data file. The web page can be downloaded from the server by the client browser and displayed as a viewable object. The viewable object can contain one or more components, such as spreadsheets, text, hotlinks, pictures, sound, and video objects.
One key problem with browsing web pages is that it often becomes difficult for the user to return back to previously visited web pages of interest. Web pages have an address called a Uniform Resource Locator (URL), which is long and cumbersome for the user to remember or even write down. Some current browsers provide the feature of a sequential list of web pages that the user previously viewed. With such a feature, as the user visits various web pages, the browser typically records the URLs in the sequential list. The user can then select one of the pages from this list using the keyboard or a mouse. Unfortunately, simply having a list of the pages that have been previously viewed does not provide enough help for the user to find that one page that has a bit of interesting information since the number of pages browsed can be large.
Many current browsers have attempted to address this problem by providing a "bookmark" list. This bookmark list stores favorite URLs of the user's choosing. When the user browses a page that the user would like to see again, the user can save the URL for that page in the bookmark list. In the future, when the user wishes to browse that page again, the user goes to the bookmark list and selects the page, which frees the user from needing to remember the URL. This feature forces the user to manually choose the web pages that are to be stored in the bookmark list. Also, since there is only one bookmark list, over time the list can grow very large, which again makes it difficult for the user to find the particular page of interest.
Another problem is that users often have more than one area of interest. For example, the user may start out looking for information on lawn tractors and in the process catch a case of spring-fever and start to look for information on bicycles, then go back to looking for lawn tractors, get bored and then start looking for fishing lures. There were then three different topics that the user investigated, but currently there is no aid to help users automatically organize these categories in the bookmark list.
From the foregoing, it can be seen that a need exists for a method and system for generating and cataloging automatic bookmark-list entries.